About Betty Tompkins

Rendered in softly airbrushed tones, Betty Tompkins’s photorealist paintings of intimate sexual encounters, including exposed genitalia, penetration, and masturbation, derive from pornography. Though her series of nine “Fuck Paintings” were flagged by French customs officials for pornographic content and withheld from display in 1973, they have since received belated acknowledgment and appreciation. Tompkins carefully crops out faces or body parts to excise narrative detail, enlarging the scale to fill large expanses of wall. By emptying her paintings of signifiers of race, class, time, and circumstance, Tompkins presents erotic encounters between two (or sometimes more) powerfully consonant bodies.

American, b. 1945, Washington, D.C., based in New York, NY, United States